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Perspectives: Post-admission controls the next step for NAC

Post-admission controls would shore up NAC/NAP shortcomings. If anything, the endpoint security story has been one of how the marketing power of industry giants can stall customer purchase decisions. Cisco Systems' Network Admission Control (NAC) and Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP) initiatives both emphasize pre-admission control, quarantining non-compliant endpoints to protect against attacks. It has taken the collective voice of small endpoint security vendors to raise awareness of the greater demand for post-admission control. After all, blocking people is easy; the hard job is finding ways to safely conductbusiness when the unmanaged endpoint of a business partner or customer is not up to snuff. Customers I talk to want more out of NAC/NAP, and many are holding off on the technologies until they can get it. The problem is how to handle customer or partner devices that cannot be quarantined or forced to comply with a higher security standard than that which their organizations require. Asking third parties to ...